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bruce babbit "Cities in the Wilderness"
Restoring the Florida Everglades. Dismantling obsolete dams. Returning the wolf to Yellowstone and the condor to the wild. Creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Each was a landmark of environmental progress in the 1990s and each was realized under the guidance of then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.
Now he draws on these experiences to develop a surprising message: such episodic conservation victories, however important, will not be sufficient either to protect our disappearing open spaces or to contain the blight of urban sprawl.
In his new book, CITIES IN THE WILDERNESS, Bruce Babbitt makes the case for a new national land use policy. Throughout our history, from George Washington’s day to the present, federal policies have encouraged and subsidized destructive resource exploitation and out-of-control development that threaten the American landscape. The time has come for an enlightened role that the federal government can play, to ensure that the places and creatures we care about will endure for generations to come.
Babbitt will discuss:
• What Las Vegas and New Jersey can teach the rest of America about conservation;
• How to consolidate Federal land to preserve ecosystems and wildlife;
• The tactics necessary to bring competing interests to the bargaining table;
• How we can fix the Missouri River;
• New roles and goals for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and
• How smart land use planning makes for better cities and more open space.
The message is clear: America can be a land of growth and opportunity, but not at the expense of the landscapes we cherish.
From Bruce Babbitt’s incisive analysis comes a vision and a program for how it should be done: a federal leadership role in land use planning, a new way of thinking about open space that retains local control while acknowledging national interests. Cities in the Wilderness celebrates key ac-complishments in the environmental field while planning for greater ones – and Bruce Babbitt is an inspirational guide along that path.
Since 2003, the board has been under fire from owners of rejected works and members of the artist’s circle who claim their knowledge of Warhol’s practice is ignored. The board has routinely denied the authenticity of silkscreens made without Warhol’s direct supervision, but his former associates argue that to reject such works contradicts Warhol’s practice of having works of art printed without his direct oversight. Scholars point out that it was precisely Warhol’s blurring of authorship and his adoption of modes of mass production that mark his significance in the history of art. There is growing consensus in the field that, rather than exclude such works from the catalogue raisonné being compiled by the foundation, they should be included, allowing the market to decide their value.
“It is just bad art history and folly not to draw on the contemporaries who actually knew the artist,” says art critic Richard Dorment of the Daily Telegraph in London, a commentator in a BBC documentary on the controversy, scheduled to air in late January. “They are saying he worked like an Old Master and that his touch was very important,” says Mr Dorment, “but he is a conceptual artist, the main descendant of Duchamp”.
Architects may see a dreamy parallel to Le Corbusier's concrete 1950's apartment-block housing in Marseille, raised up on rows of streamlined columns. Yet Ms. Hadid's design draws as much on the serpentine freeways of Los Angeles and postwar Europe's industrial landscape as it does on such High Modernist precedents. Its imposing, muscular forms celebrate the heroic large-scale urban infrastructure of an earlier era, allowing us to see it with fresh eyes.